Thursday, 30 June 2016

Servus and welcome back to my little creative spot!
Today I am sharing a painting tutorial over at the DecoArt Mixed Media Blog, that will teach you how to create the impression of portrait paintings without having to draw or sketch!!!!
(I hope it has already gone live. If not, I will very likely have miscalculated time zones and it will go up later today).

I am well aware that many of us shy the hurdle of drawing persons or faces to use them as their starting point for paintings, but I will show you a way of dodging this tricky step and still create some impressive paintings of persons or portraits!

The Ronacher is a renowned old theatre in Vienna, that was founded in the late eightteen-hundreds and meant to be a theatre for the middle classes. I am sure men might have looked like this when enjoying a theatre evening out. Wearing their best suits, gloves and moustaches! ;)

Monday, 27 June 2016

Hi, servus and welcome back to another of my invitations on visiting the Calico Craft Parts Blog where I have a new project and tutorial for you today.

Here's a little sneak peek as usual:

My son and I love nature and especially everything about ocean life and creatures and one of my fondest memories of him when he was little was his excitement over whales of all sorts - especially of the "Humppack Whaaale"! ;)

Well, I know of course that this is a sperm whale I have used - but he loved these too of course (as he loved all the other fantastic deep sea creatures). And still does.
And so do I.

So if you want to see the full ocean diorama and tutorial I have created for you, I would ask you to hop over to the Calico Craft Parts blog (by clicking HERE).

Friday, 17 June 2016

Over at Emerald Creek we have a new dare for you - this time you are to use "anything but paper"!And if you haven't stopped by the day before yesterday to see my project for the SanDee&amelie's Steampunk Challenges mid month reminder, I would like to ask you to scroll down to the previous post and check it out too.

For my Emerald Creek project I decided to go for some excessive heat embossing with their lovely Emerald Creek embossing powders I have and use some rubber stamps with them.

Stamping into embossing enamels creates awesome texture and is great fun! And if you are afraid your rubber stamps might get ruined - don't be: it really is very easy. Just mist your rubber stamps with a bit of cold water from a spray bottle before stamping into the still warm embossing enamels!

Then leave the rubber stamp in place until the embossing enamel has completely cooled down (which takes a few minutes). Afterwards you can easily peel it off.

And if you don't like the result - simply reheat the embossing enamel and try again! Always make sure you have a thick enough layer of embossing enamel to stamp in. I used two to three coats of added embossing powder before I stamped into the melted enamel. You can simply add another layer by sprinkling on more embossing powder while the previous layer is still hot. That will keep your new layer of embossing powder in place without the use of additional embossing ink.

I was also daring and made my own mix of four different Emerald Creek embossing powders:

That mix was added to the third wood heart. The other two were done using Burnt Copper Leaves and Easter Parade embossing powders directly from the jars.

To highlight the texture I used Ranger Adirondack Alcohol Inks:

I glued the fab skull charm and fleur brads to the hearts and then mounted them to an old linen book spine. The skull and brads were toned down using alcohol inks too so they matched the look of the embossing enamels.

I added a little Distress Crayon from the Distress Crayons Set #3 around the edges of the panel and smudged it with my finger before I spread it with a wet brush. I created a hanging loop from some rusty wire. Et voilá:

Those who know me a bit, also know that I looooove found objects. Beautifully aged and timeworn bits and pieces that would tell stories from the past if they could only speak. And I love assemblage art!

Assemblage art originates from the late 1800s, when sculptor Auguste Rodin already started to use casts made of his already finished pieces to combine these parts to form new pieces of art.
Pablo Picasso and Marcel Duchamp did assemblages too and now there are a lot of contemporary artists who create wonderful assemblage art. And I especially love the magical art of Joseph Cornell!!!

For today's project I wanted to create a piece of assemblage art that consisted of found objects that could "speak for themselves" (instead of having to be altered or done over with special media to make them more appealing).

I decided to use a beautiful little black box that I was recently given to by dear friends (who keep the good lookin' emptied boxes for me - which makes me a really lucky person to have such thoughtful and caring friends!) and some of my long hoarded treasures alongside a few bought embellishments to create this time travel box...

The guy in the blue jumper was a collectible pin from a series that came with the Julius Meinl Coffee tins back when my grandma and grandaunts were young girls. I have an old tin with some more and an old diablo game that belonged to one of my grandaunts. But what good are these treasures if you don't put them out there so they can be looked at?

So I decided it was time to shine some light on some of these old originals (like the pin, the threaded and other vintage buttons, the watchmakers tools in the little corked glass vial, the rusted spring and ring and the frozen charlotte) alongside some embellishments from Prima and the idea-ology range.

The background and also cover of my box show my great-grandmother's passport!

I made colour copies and sealed them with matte Decou-Page. I also used the Decou-Page to fix all the items to the box.

Now I have some of my beloved treasures in a box nearby (instead of hidden away in tins and drawers), and if I take off the lid, I also have a little assemblage frame. As the objects are beautiful as they are, I decided to not add any paints or other media and keep their original state.

I just needed to alter the look of the idea-ology "Salvaged" word band using alcohol inks to make it match the other objects' colours.

I think the original colour from the yellowed passport paper, the shabby white of the frozen charlotte and the vintage buttons, the orange tones on the finnabair pieces and the rusty spring alongside the red from the thread that holds the passport pages together and from the stamp in the top right corner all go together really well! And the black box frame repeats the black of the writing - so all the elements fuse together beautifully. Only the blue jumper forms a little contrast - but that makes the oranges, browns and pale yellow-ish colours pop even more.

Playing around with colours, shapes and composition was not only fun but also a very relaxing thing to do. And browsing my treasures in all their boxes and little drawers was very enjoyable too. ;)

I hope to see you over at our challenge blog, where you will find all the other fabulous projects of Team B today! And of course I hope you will join in our challenge and have a lot of steampunk creating fun!

Thursday, 9 June 2016

I have another DecoArt tutorial for you today that will go live on the DecoArt Mixed Media Blog (or already has...I never really manage to calculate time zones properly *rollingeyes)! Did you know that when you use DecoArt Media Crackle Paste you can create dimensional projects in no time? Well...check out my project and tutorial!

Here's an image of the finished project, so you know what awaits you over at the Mixed Media Blog:

If you have some left over embellishments you would like to use up, if you want to create but only have little time or if you simply want to get messy (in that specific good, creative way), this is the perfect project for you! I hope you will like my tutorial!